Israeli and American Jewish media have become willing facilitators of yet another fraud perpetrated by right-wing MKs and their NGO counterparts. The Knesset foreign affairs committee began the fraud by titling the hearing, “Singling Out Jewish Students by BDS on U.S. Campuses.” MK Anat Berko, who touts herself as a former IDF colonel and “expert” on Islamist terror, made flagrantly false claims that the BDS movement compiled lists of Jewish students along with their addresses. Berko is the solon who claimed Palestine doesn’t exist because there is no “P” in Arabic. Not to be outdone, MKs from Yesh Atid and Labor also chimed in supporting this hash of a hearing. The charges were formulated as if this were BDS’ first step toward a Final Solution of the Israel Problem. For those pro-Israelists without a sense of humor, the above sentence was meant entirely ironically.
Arutz 7, a settler website, ran this headline: Jews Persecuted Around the World. A video of some of the proceedings (in Hebrew) is here. NGO Monitor, a group whose leader was sued successfully for libel by an Israeli Palestinian non-profit group, even claimed that BDS’ anti-Semitic activism could be criminal in nature. Another NGO, Reservists to the Front, which was founded to combat Breaking the Silence, joined in claiming (without any evidence) that there were 941 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. in 2015. 90 were committed on campuses. He added, for good measure:
Jewish students are the most persecuted minorities on U.S. campuses, bar none.
Former Shin Bet chief and current Likud MK testified not just to his histrionic view of BDS, but his abject racism:
“BDS is an anti-Semitic wave against Jews. To my sorrow, it exists in nations considered enlightened and campuses considered intellectual [sic]. The style of BDS activists bring an Olympic judo medal, but nothing respectable. A great portion of BDS activism springs from the frustration of recent years when the subject of Palestine has sunk from the international agenda.”
Dichter continued his delusional rant thanking the Reservists group for the fake claims they offered: “The things done against Jewish students are carried out with the intent of harming Israel.”
The former domestic security agency chief was alluding to a bit of guerilla theater in which Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP) placed “eviction notices” under the dormitory room doors of students at NYU. Jewish students who received the notices filed complaints with the administration that they were targeted because they were Jews. In reality, two dormitories received the flyers. One of them contained a Shabbat elevator for observant Jewish students. Both buildings contained both Jewish and non-Jewish students and there is no evidence that Jewish students were the only ones targeted for the notices.
NGO Monitor claimed that SJP deliberately distributed eviction notices to non-Jewish students so it could not be prosecuted for a hate crime. Again, an evidence-free claim. This action did not involve, as the media reports allege, any lists of Jewish students, their mail or e-mail addresses. None of the reports substantiate this claim with any evidence whatsoever. There is no evidence. Even the ADL, not known for its fondness for BDS acknowledged this in the Forward :
“According to our research, there is no evidence pointing to Students for Justice in Palestine compiling specific lists of Jewish students.”
Even more virulent pro-Israel groups stepped back from Berko’s hoax:
… Officials from the Zionist Organization of America and Stand With Us…. told the Forward they had no knowledge of this sort of activity taking place.
But that didn’t stop other members of the pro-Israel media. The Times of Israel (which Jeffrey Goldberg calls a “highly credible” publication):
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a pro-Palestinian student advocacy group, has been compiling lists of Jewish students on college campuses in North America and detailing their dorm address information, raising fears for the students’ safety, Israel Radio reports.
The report came as the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee met earlier Tuesday to discuss Israel boycott efforts at US colleges.
Israel HaYom also went to town on the report. It’s come to smell like a bunch of flies buzzing around a corpse of a story. That’s what all the lies amount to. Defending the indefensible. You get tired of having to defend Israel’s oppression and so you turn the tables and blame the accusers, the victims. They’re not the real victims, you are. They hate you. Want you dead. You? You did nothing wrong. It’s all their fault. Focus it all on them. Then they won’t be able to shine the light back at you and what you’ve done.
As a female writer I often cringe at the embarrassing collection of beaming, smooth-faced young women the Guardian fields to wrap dangerous political extremisms in lipsticky identity-politics. There’s a touch of exploitation in it, intended or not. Here’s the latest example, by Lucia Graves:
The article sets out the case that Trump does not deserve unbiased press coverage. The media would love to be fair to him, of course, because fairness is their watchword – but they just can’t do it, because they have to protect their audience from his lies. Censorship is actually a sort of duty, Lucia tells us in her elementary-school prose, because Trump is “rubbish”.
His campaign is indeed a place where journalistic objectivity meets its limits, but it’s not because we’re deliberately gunning for him. There simply is no fairness in presenting both sides of a story when one side is consistently rubbish, to put it kindly, or a dumpster fire, in this cycle’s parlance. Trump changes his mind like it’s the weather and tells a lie every five minutes, going by Politico’s best count.
If we get past the awkward syntax (how often does Lucia think Trump changes the weather?), we have to admit “a lie every five minutes” is quite a lot of lies. True the article doesn’t tell us what any of those lies actually are, but Politico does (well, actually it doesn’t do that, but it does run a list of alleged “lies” Trump told over a single week, some of which may seem a bit relevant). But just in case you’re still not feeling convinced of the need for wholesale suppression of open political debate based on the fact that (shock) politicians lie, here’s a little more of Lucia’s A-grade analysis:
CNN and MSNBC have taken to putting parentheticals in their chyrons to correct erroneous claims in real time. The New York Times has started including the sweep of history in even the most straightforward news stories to demonstrate breaks from longstanding political norms.
The fact-checkers, in particular, are working overtime.
Trump’s also been keeping Politifact busy. As of late June, 95% of the site’s 158 fact-checks of Trump were rated “false” or “pants on fire”, while the same could be said for just 16% of Hillary Clinton’s 120 rated statements.
Ok, who is going to argue with a collection of data like this? Trump is 95% liar and Clinton is only 16% liar! Politifact says so! If that’s not a done deal, cast-iron, knock down argument for total censorship of Donald Trump and all he stands for I’d like to know what is.
Wait, what? Do I hear you say you want to know how they arrive at these statistics? You want to see the actual claims being made so you can evaluate them for yourself? You have heard that Politifact is not an entirely objective or neutral outfit?
No, I’m sorry, you need to get with the program. Media-bias is no longer a thing to be ashamed of, because the media is only biased against bad people. Today’s censorship is just about helping us understand things – weeding out the lies and leaving only the lovely truth for us to enjoy in nice pre-packed, easily-digested soundbites. Lucia is here to tell us our lovely cuddly Big Brother is only “fact-checking” so we don’t need to.
Unbeknownst to consumers of mainstream Western media, trials in Ukraine are ongoing against officers of the former ‘Berkut’ police force who were on duty in Maidan Square, Kyiv at the height of the violent protest movement that overthrew the elected President Victor Yanukovych on February 22, 2014.
‘Maidan Massacre’ trial in Kyiv – Aug 4, 2016
Trial proceedings are filmed and broadcast (in Ukrainian language), but Western media is loathe to cover and report on proceedings. That’s because trial testimony is countering the centrepiece of the Western propaganda construct of the overthrow of Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych in February 2014, namely the killings by sniper fire of dozens of protesters on Maidan Square on February 20, 2014.
Western governments and media have claimed all along that the killings were the work of the Berkut special police under orders of the Yanukovych government to suppress the protests. But as revealed at the trial and brought to light in the English language by the ongoing writing of Ottawa researcher Ivan Katchanovski, it turns out that most if not all of the sniper killings were perpetrated by paramilitaries of the extreme, right-wing forces on Maidan Square.
Katchanovski is reporting the revelations at the ‘Maidan Massacre’ trials on his Facebook page and in occasional academic papers analyzing the whole snipers episode. Enclosed is his report of August 5, 2016 on Facebook, reporting on trial revelations the day before.
By Ivan Katchanovski, August 5, 2016
An on-site, forensic ballistic investigation which was conducted by a ballistics expert on a GPU [Prosecutor General of Ukraine] request and made public during the Maidan massacre trial on August 4, 2016 confirmed my APSA paper [research paper presented to American Political Science Association in September 2015] finding that a Maidan medic was wounded from a Maidan-controlled location on February 20, 2014 and not from the Berkut positions. The moment of his wounding was filmed by CNN from the Hotel Ukraina and used by the media in the West and in Ukraine as evidence that the government forces deliberately targeted even medics. My analysis found that the medics were shot by Maidan “snipers” as a part of a false flag operation.
The on-site forensic ballistic investigation concluded that Roman Kotliarevsky was shot from a sector ranging from the Hotel Ukraina to the Bank Arkada. The ballistic expert did this based on the reconstruction of the position of Kotliarevsky and his wound location that were shown by this wounded medic but the expert amazingly did not see the CNN video to make a more precise determination about the shooting location. [Lengthy trial video footage streaming of Aug 4, 2016 here.]
A forensic medical report made public during the trial confirmed that Kotliarevsky was shot in the top back part of his right thigh at a steep angle from a top to bottom direction. This wounded medic stated during this investigation experiment that he was most likely shot from the Bank Arkada based on the steep direction of his wound channel. The GPU investigation continues to deny that any “snipers” were at these locations and charges the Berkut police with wounding Kotliarevsky.
A forensic ballistic report, made recently public during the trial concluded that this medic was shot from the same 7.62×39 caliber AKM-type weapon, or its hunting version, which was used to kill Mykola-Oleh Pankiv. The forensic medical reports, made public during the Maidan massacre trial last year, also found that Pankiv was killed from a steep vertical angle. These forensic findings confirm my APSA paper finding that Pankiv was killed from the same Maidan controlled-sector, specifically the Bank Arkada and Horodetskoho Street buildings (pp. 39-40 of APSA research paper):
“Mykola-Oleh Pankiv was fatally wounded 10:07am when he was filmed in the Zelenyi Front video sitting behind a tree protecting from the Berkut side and facing Horodetskoho Street and Bank Arkada. The prosecution charges confirmed that he was shot in his chest. This indicates either of these two buildings in the Maidan-controlled area but the prosecution charged the Berkut policemen with his murder. Within several seconds of his killing, Oleksander Labetsky, who was next to Pankiv behind the same tree facing Arkada, was wounded. He said that he was shot in his inner thigh and saw the bullet on the ground nearby. His position shortly before he was shot and the wound location and its very steep direction indicate that he was most likely shot by a sniper on the roof of Bank Arkada.
At 10:17am, CNN filmed from the Hotel Ukraina a Maidan medic being shot in his right leg, but did not report in its Emmy-nominated coverage of the Maidan massacre that this direction pointed to a shooter in one of the Maidan-controlled buildings. Roman Kotliarevsky, the wounded Maidan medic, said that his position at the moment of his shooting and a steep wound in the side back area of his right thigh indicated that he was shot from the Bank Arkada or a roof of one of the buildings there, i.e. on Horodetskoho Street. He also stated that he was wounded with 7.62mm bullet and that the investigation in his shooting was dragged out and that no specific suspects were identified.”
Several years ago, my articles advocating a large hike in the minimum wage caught the attention of James Galbraith, the prominent liberal economist, and we became a little friendly. As president of Economists for Peace and Security, he invited me to speak on those issues at his DC conference in late 2013. And after the presentations, he arranged a meeting with a friend of his, prominent in DC political circles, at which the two of us could present my minimum wage proposals.
While we were waiting for the taxi to take us to that meeting, I heard him quietly discussing a few other matters with a friend standing next to him. Phrases such as “attacking Russia,” “a nuclear first strike,” and “Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs” came to my ears. I can’t recall the exact words, but the conversation stuck in my mind both at the time and on my later flight home that evening, and although I hadn’t mentioned anything, I wondered what remarkable historical facts he had been discussing. His father, the legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith, had spent decades as one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals and was a very influential figure in the Kennedy Administration, so I assumed that he was not merely engaging in casual speculation.
Finally, a week or two later, my curiosity got the better of me, and I dropped him a note, gingerly raising the topic I’d accidentally overheard. I suggested that if he possessed any private information regarding so astonishing a possibility—that the Kennedy Administration might have considered a nuclear first strike against the USSR—perhaps he had a duty to bring the facts to public awareness lest they be lost to history.
He replied that he’d indeed found persuasive evidence that the US military had carefully planned a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and agreed about the historical importance. But he’d already published an article laying out the case. Twenty years earlier. In The American Prospect, a very respectable though liberal-leaning magazine. So I located a copy on the Internet:
I quickly read the article and was stunned. The central document was a Top Secret/Eyes Only summary memo of a July 1961 National Security Council meeting written by Howard Burris, the military aide to then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, which was afterward deposited in the Johnson Archives and eventually declassified. The discussion focused on the effectiveness of a planned nuclear first strike, suggesting that 1963 would be the optimal date since America’s relative advantage in intercontinental nuclear missiles would be greatest at that point. Galbraith’s student, Heather A. Purcell, had discovered the memo and co-authored the article with him, and as they pointed out, this meeting was held soon after the US military had discovered that the Soviet missile forces were far weaker than previously had been realized, leading to the plans for the proposed attack and also proving that the first strike under discussion could only have been an American one.
This history was quite different from the deterrent-based framework of American nuclear-war strategy that I had always absorbed from reading my textbooks and newspapers.
Obviously no nuclear attack took place, so the plans must have been changed at some point or discarded, and there were various indications that President Kennedy had had important doubts from the very beginning. But the argument made was that at the time, the first strike proposal was taken very seriously by America’s top political and military leadership. Once we accept that idea, other historical puzzles more easily fall into place.
Consider, for example, the massive campaign of “civil defense” that America launched immediately thereafter, leading to the construction of large numbers of fallout shelters throughout the country, including the backyard suburban ones which generated some famous ironic images. Although I’m hardly an expert on nuclear war, the motivation had never made much sense to me, since in most cases the supplies would only have been sufficient to last a few weeks or so, while the deadly radioactive fallout from numerous Soviet thermonuclear strikes on our urban centers would have been long-lasting. But an American first strike changes this picture. A successful U.S. attack would have ensured that few if any bombs fell on American soil, with the shelters intended merely to provide a couple of weeks of useful protection until the global radioactive dust-clouds resulting from the nuclear destruction of the Soviet Union had dissipated, and these anyway would have only reached America in highly attenuated form.
Furthermore, we must reassess the background to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, certainly one of the most important and dangerous events of that era. If Soviet military analysts had reached conclusions similar to those of their American counterparts, it is hardly surprising that their political leaders would have taken the considerable risk of deploying nuclear warheads on intermediate range missiles close to American cities, thereby greatly multiplying their deterrent capability immediately prior to their point of greatest strategic vulnerability. And there was also the real possibility that their intelligence agents might have somehow gotten hints of the American plans for an actual nuclear first strike. The traditional view presented in the American media has always been that an unprovoked American attack was simply unimaginable, any Soviet paranoia notwithstanding, but if such an attack was not only imagined but actually planned, then our Cold War narrative must be significantly modified. Indeed, perhaps important aspects of the superpower confrontations of that era should be completely inverted.
Could such a momentous historical discovery have been so totally ignored by our mainstream journalists and historians that I’d never heard of it during the previous twenty years? Gossipy rumors of an additional JFK infidelity might periodically make the headlines, but why was there no discussion of serious plans to launch a non-defensive global thermonuclear war likely to kill many millions?
I have limited expertise in either analyzing nuclear warfare strategy or interpreting national security documents, so I could easily be making an error in evaluating the strength of the case. But in a later issue of TAP, William Burr and David Alan Rosenberg, scholars proficient in exactly those areas, published a lengthy rebuttal to the article, followed by a rejoinder from Galbraith and Purcell. And in my own opinion, the Burr/Rosenberg critique was quite unpersuasive.
Correspondence: Nuclear Scare
William Burr, David Alan Rosenberg, James K. Galbraith, Heather A. Purcell, The American Prospect, Spring 1995
In their arguments, they emphasized that the key document was found in the Vice Presidential archives, while the National Archives and those of President Kennedy himself are usually a far better source of important material. But perhaps that’s exactly the point. The authenticity of the Burris document was never disputed, and Burr/Rosenberg cite absolutely no contradictory archival material, implying that the documentary evidence was not available to them. So the materials dealing with such an extraordinarily explosive proposal had either elsewhere not been declassified or might even have been removed from the main archives, with only the less direct Burris summary memo in a secondary location surviving the purge and later being declassified, perhaps because its treatment of the subject was much less explicit.
Meanwhile, a careful reading of the Burris memo seems to strongly support the Galbraith/Purcell interpretation, namely that in July 1961 President Kennedy and his top national security officials discussed cold-blooded plans for a full nuclear attack against the Soviet Union in roughly two years’ time, when the relative imbalance of strategic forces would be at its maximum. The proposal seemed quite concrete, rather than merely being one of the numerous hypotheticals endlessly produced by all military organizations.
In a later footnote, Galbraith even mentioned that he subsequently had his interpretation personally confirmed by Kennedy’s former National Security Advisor: “When once I asked the late Walt Rostow if he knew anything about the National Security Council meeting of July 20, 1961 (at which these plans were presented), he responded with no hesitation: `Do you mean the one where they wanted to blow up the world?’”
Once I accepted the reasonable likelihood of the analysis, I was shocked at how little attention the remarkable article had received. When I simply Googled the names of the authors “Galbraith Heather Purcell” I mostly discovered very brief mentions scattered here and there, generally in specialized books or in articles written by Galbraith himself, and found absolutely nothing in the major media. Possibly one of the most important revisions to our entire history of the Cold War—with huge implications for the Cuban Missile Crisis—seems to have never achieved any significant public awareness.
And there is also a sequel on this same topic. In 2001 military affairs writer Fred Kaplan published a major article in The Atlantic with the explicit title “JFK’s First-Strike Plan.” Drawing on a wealth of newly declassified archival documents, he similarly described how the Kennedy Administration had prepared plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviets. His analysis was somewhat different, suggesting that Kennedy himself had generally approved the proposal, but that the attack was intended as an option to be used during a hypothetical future military confrontation rather than being aimed for a particular scheduled date.
The government plans unearthed by Kaplan are clearly referring to the same strategy discussed in the Burris memo, but since Kaplan provides none of the documents themselves, it is difficult to determine whether or not the evidence is consistent with the somewhat different Galbraith/Purcell interpretation. It is also decidedly odd that Kaplan’s long article gives no indication that he was even aware of that previous theory or its differing conclusions, containing not a single sentence mentioning or dismissing it. I find it very difficult to believe that a specialist such as Kaplan remained totally unaware of the earlier American Prospect analysis, but perhaps this might possibly be explained given the near-total media blackout. Prior to the establishment of the Internet or even in its early days, important information ignored by the media might easily vanish almost without a trace.
Kaplan’s long article seems to have suffered that similar fate. Aside from a few mentions in some of Kaplan’s own later pieces, I found virtually no references at all in the last 15 years when I casually Googled it. Admittedly, the timing could not have been worse, with the article appearing in the October 2001 edition of the magazine, released in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but the silence is still troubling.
The unfortunate fact is that when a massively important story is reported only once, with virtually no follow-up, the impact may be minimal. Only a small slice of the public encounters that initial account, and the lack of any repetition would eventually lead even those individuals to forget it, or perhaps even vaguely assume that the subsequent silence implied that the claims had been mistaken or later debunked. Every standard historical narrative of the 1960s that continues to exclude mention of serious plans for an American nuclear first strike constitutes a tacit denial of that important reality, implicitly suggesting that the evidence does not exist or had been discredited. As a consequence, I doubt whether more than a sliver of those seemingly informed Americans who carefully read the NYT and WSJ each morning are aware of these important historical facts, and perhaps the same is even true of the journalists who write for those esteemed publications. Only repetition and continuing coverage gradually incorporates a story into our framework of the past.
It is easy to imagine how things might have gone differently. Suppose, for example, that similarly solid evidence of plans for a devastating and unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union had been found in the archival records of the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. Is there not a far greater likelihood that the story would have been heavily covered and then endlessly repeated in our media outlets, until it had become fully embedded in our standard histories and was known to every informed citizen?
In some respects, these discussions of events from over a half-century ago have little relevance for us today: the individuals involved are now all merely names in our history books and the world is a very different place. So although the sharp differences between the Galbraith/Purcell analysis and that of Kaplan might engage academic specialists, the practical differences would today be minimal.
But what has enormous significance is the media silence itself. If our media failed to report these shocking new facts about the early 1960s, how much can we rely upon it for coverage of present-day events of enormous importance, given the vastly more immediate pressures and political interests which are surely brought to bear? If our mainstream histories of what happened fifty years ago are highly unreliable, what does that suggest about the stories we read each morning concerning the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine or the South China Sea or the Middle East?
Consider a particularly troubling thought-experiment. Suppose that the proposed nuclear attack on Russia had actually gone ahead, resulting in millions or tens of millions dead from the bombs and worldwide radioactive fallout, perhaps even including a million or more American casualties if the first strike had failed to entirely eliminate all retaliatory capability. Under such a dire scenario, is it not likely that every American media organ would have been immediately enlisted to sanitize and justify the terrible events, with virtually no dissent allowed? Surely John F. Kennedy would have been enshrined as our most heroic wartime president—greater than Lincoln and FDR combined—the leader who boldly saved the West from an imminent Soviet attack, a catastrophic nuclear Pearl Harbor. How could our government ever admit the truth? Even decades later, this patriotic historical narrative, uniformly endorsed by newspapers, books, films, and television, would have become almost unassailable. Only the most marginal and anti-social individuals would dare to suggest that the facts might actually have been otherwise, and they would be widely regarded as eccentric or even mentally ill for doing so. After all, how would the general public know anything different? As I always tell people, the media creates reality.
I am grateful that the world escaped this terrible nuclear disaster. But I find it disturbing that I spent decades religiously reading The New York Times every morning, but only discovered this crucial element of the Cold War by overhearing a conversation while waiting for a taxi.
The label ‘conspiracy theorist’ is used by Western Establishment gatekeepers as a means of shutting down debate and smearing those who have the temerity to challenge elite-friendly narratives.
As I argued in an Op-Edge last year, there’s a great irony here. Over the last twenty years or so, the biggest pushers of conspiracy theories (CTs) have been Western Establishment gatekeepers themselves.
In fact, the most outlandish, fact-free and downright dangerous ‘CTs’ have been promoted by those who are the quickest to yell “conspiracy theorist!” at others.
So here are the top ten ‘acceptable’ Western establishment conspiracy theories. If you peddle them you won’t be labelled a ‘crank’ or nut-job’, but be hailed as an ‘expert’ who may even be deserving of a column in a ‘serious newspaper’ like the Washington Post, or the London Times. And who knows, you might even get a lucrative offer from a top publishing house to write a book about conspiracy theories.
1.Iraq has WMDs which threaten the world!
The most deadly conspiracy theory of them all – one which led to an illegal invasion and the destruction of a sovereign state and the deaths of up to 1m people. But the people who promoted it paid no professional penalty. Thirteen years on, the ‘punditocracy’ in the US and UK is still dominated by those who assured us Saddam had WMDs (and also that the secular, cigar-smoking Sound of Music lover had links to al-Qaeda). Remember that the next time you see a smug, self-regarding member of the neocon elite journos club loftily accuse someone they regard as their social and intellectual inferior of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’.
2.Iran’s developing nukes!
Since the early 90s we’ve been told the Islamic Republic is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, or has already got them. The claims made repeatedly over the past 25 years by Israeli PM Netanyahu have been echoed by the same bunch of uber-hawks who pushed conspiracy theory 1. If you assert, without any evidence that say, Zambia is on the brink of developing nukes, you’ll be called a nutcase. But if you assert, without any evidence, that Iran is doing the same, then you’ll greatly increase your chances of being invited as an ‘expert’ into the studios of Fox News or Newsnight.
3. Jeremy Corbyn deliberately sabotaged the ‘Remain campaign’ in Britain’s EU referendum.
This has been a popular conspiracy theory peddled in elite Blairite circles in the UK this summer. The same anti-Corbyn crowd who tell us that the left-wing Labour Party leader is a massive turn-off with voters, blame said Labour Party leader for not doing more to persuade Britons to vote to stay in the EU!
In fact, Corbyn’s qualified support for the EU was much more in tune with public opinion than the Blairites’ EU fanaticism. Labour under Corbyn did deliver a majority vote for Remain among its supporters. Meanwhile, Islington, where Corbyn has his own seat, registered the sixth best result for Remain (75.2 percent) in the country. Some ‘sabotage’, eh, folks?
4. Assad is helping/working with ISIS and wants them to expand.
This one has been pushed by and large by the same people who pushed CTs 1 and 2 above. The theory says that the wicked Syrian tyrant wanted ISIS to gain territory in order for him to present himself as the ‘good guy’ in the conflict.
However, we’ve learned from declassified secret US intelligence documents from 2012 that the prospect of a ‘Salafist principality’ being established in eastern Syria was “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want” as it would “isolate the Syrian regime”. But let’s not mention evidence that it was Assad’s opponents – and not Assad – who welcomed the rise and expansion of ISIS.
That will only be dismissed as a conspiracy theory’!
And let’s ignore the Syrian Army’s liberation of Palymra from ISIS as well, shall we? It just doesn’t fit the ‘Why Assad won’t fight ISIS narrative!
5. Russia is providing ISIS with an air force
In October 2015, after Russia had started air strikes on terrorist targets in Syria, a new variation of Conspiracy Theory 4 started to circulate. Russia, we were told, was also helping ISIS and giving the Islamic State an air force!
Yet when a Russian passenger airliner was taken down by an ISIS/ISIL bomb later that month, we were told that it was a ‘warning shot’ for Moscow. If Russia was helping Islamic State/Daesh and providing it with an air force in Syria, why on earth would the group target a Russian plane?
As I wrote at the time: “You can’t say on one day that Russia is helping ISIS and that ISIS is gaining ground because of Russian actions and the next day claim that ISIS is bombing a Russian airline because they are, er.. angry with Russia”.
Or rather you can, if you’re a neocon who peddles outlandish anti-Russian conspiracy theories.
6. Trotskyists are taking over the Labour Party!
Record numbers of people are joining the Labour party to support leader Jeremy Corbyn, an anti-war democratic socialist whose policies represent a clean break with Blairism. And guess what?- these new members are disciples of a Russian revolutionary who died over 75 years ago!
Labour’s membership surged by 100,000 this summer – whoever would have thought there were so many Trotskyists in Britain! It’s all the more surprising given that the main Trotskyist party, the SWP, only has around 6,000 members.
According to Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson, who opposes Corbyn, Trotskyist entrists’ are “twisting the arms” of young members. Perhaps they’re also threatening these young members with a spell in the Red Army…?
‘Trots under the bed’ is the 2016 variation of ‘Reds under the Bed’ for McCarthyite conspiracy theorists in the Labour Party, who are desperate to restrict party democracy and return to elite-friendly Tory-lite, pro-war policies.
7. Russia was behind the DNC email leak
No evidence has yet been produced that the Kremlin was responsible for the leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee, so let’s just push this conspiracy theory 24-7 shall we? It concerns Russia, an ‘official enemy’, so no need to wait for little things like facts, right? As Glenn Greenwald noted: “Democrats not only treated this evidence free conspiracy theory as Truth, but following the Clinton campaign, proceeded to smear Wikileaks as a Kremlin operation”.
8. Putin orchestrated football hooliganism in the European Football Championships to get Britain out of the EU
This has to be a strong contender for the nuttiest CT of 2016. Russia is very keen for Western sanctions to be lifted. So what does the Russian Prez do? He gets Russian football hooligans to attack England supporters in Marseille. And this apparently will make it more likely that Britain will vote to leave the EU.
I’m sure there were millions of people in the UK who read about English and Russian fans fighting each other in France, who turned to their partners and said ‘That does it. I’m voting for Brexit on Thursday’!
What a load of (foot)balls.
9. Donald Trump is a Russian agent
The argument in the West against Donald Trump goes: Since the Republican presidential contender does not seem keen on starting WW3 with Russia over Ukraine or Syria, he must therefore be a Russian agent! Either a ‘witting’ one or an ‘unwitting’ one!
Again, peddle these evidence-free CTs in the US or UK and you won’t lose your credibility as a ‘respected commentator’. Far from it. But if you argue that Tony Blair or David Cameron were agents of the US – either ‘witting’ or ‘unwitting’ on account of their ‘pro-US policies’ you’d face ridicule and career death. Proving once again, that some conspiracy theories are more equal than others.
10. Dr Jill Stein is a Kremlin shill!
The Green Party candidate in the US Presidential Election is attracting plenty of support from progressives who can’t see what’s progressive about Wall Street-funded and neocon supported Hillary Rodham Clinton. So guess what? As her popularity rises, Dr Stein’s been smeared as a Kremin shill and is accused having ties to Vladimir Putin.
The ‘evidence’? Well, like Trump (see CT No 9), she doesn’t seem keen to start WW3, and wait for it, she attended, along with a lot of other public figures, the RT 15th Anniversary conference in 2015.
Going to Moscow and not wanting war with Russia – or indeed with anyone else – is apparently unacceptable, and enough to get another ‘acceptable’ Establishment conspiracy theory going, folks!
Coverage of the breakdown of the partial ceasefire in Syria illustrated the main way corporate news media distort public understanding of a major foreign policy story. The problem is not that the key events in the story are entirely unreported, but that they were downplayed and quickly forgotten in the media’s embrace of themes with which they were more comfortable.
In this case, the one key event was the major offensive launched in early April by Al Nusra Front — the Al Qaeda franchise in Syria — alongside U.S.-backed armed opposition groups. This offensive was mentioned in at least two “quality” U.S. newspapers. Their readers, however, would not have read that it was that offensive that broke the back of the partial ceasefire.
On the contrary, they would have gotten the clear impression from following the major newspapers’ coverage that systematic violations by the Assad government doomed the ceasefire from the beginning.
Corporate media heralded the ceasefire agreement when it was negotiated by the United States and Russia in February, with the Los Angeles Times (2/3/16) calling it “the most determined diplomatic push to date aimed at ending the nation’s almost five-year conflict.” The “partial cessation of hostilities” was to apply between the Syrian regime and the non-jihadist forces, but not to the regime’s war with Nusra and with ISIS.
The clear implication was that the U.S.-supported non-jihadist opposition forces would have to separate themselves from Nusra, or else they would be legitimate targets for airstrikes.
But the relationship between the CIA-backed armed opposition to Assad and the jihadist Nusra Front was an issue that major U.S. newspapers had already found very difficult to cover (FAIR.org, 3/21/16).
U.S. Syria policy has been dependent on the military potential of the Nusra Front (and its close ally, Ahrar al Sham) for leverage on the Syrian regime, since the “moderate” opposition was unable to operate in northwest Syria without jihadist support. This central element in U.S. Syria policy, which both the government and the media were unwilling to acknowledge, was a central obstacle to accurate coverage of what happened to the Syrian ceasefire.
Shaping the Story
This problem began shaping the story as soon as the ceasefire agreement was announced. On Feb. 23, New York Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar wrote a news analysis on the wider tensions between the Obama administration and Russia that pointed to “a gaping loophole” in the Syria ceasefire agreement: the fact that “it permits attacks against the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, to continue.”
MacFarquhar asserted that exempting Nusra from the ceasefire “could work in Moscow’s favor, since many of the anti-Assad groups aligned with the United States fight alongside the Nusra Front.” That meant that Russia could “continue to strike United States-backed rebel groups without fear … of Washington’s doing anything to stop them,” he wrote.
On the same day, Adam Entous of the Wall Street Journalreported that Obama’s “top military and intelligence advisers don’t believe Russia will abide by a just-announced ceasefire in Syria and want to ready plans to increase pressure on Moscow by expanding covert support to rebels fighting the Russia-backed Assad regime.”
For two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, it was thus clear that the primary context of the Syria ceasefire was not its impact on Syria’s population, but how it affected the rivalry between powerful national security officials and Russia.
Contrary to those dark suspicions of Russian intentions to take advantage of the agreement to hit U.S.-supported Syrian opposition groups, however, as soon as the partial ceasefire agreement took effect on Feb. 27, Russia released a map that designated “green zones” where its air forces would not strike.
The green zones, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense, corresponded with Syrian opposition groups that had signed on to the ceasefire. Furthermore, Russia stopped bombing the Nusra-controlled areas of northwest Syria, instead focusing on ISIS targets, as Pentagon spokesperson Jeff Davis confirmed on March 14.
Breaking the Ceasefire
But instead of separating themselves from Nusra Front, the U.S.-supported armed opposition joined with Nusra and its jihadist allies in a major offensive aimed at destroying the ceasefire.
Charles Lister, a leading British specialist on the jihadists in Syria, has recounted being told by the commander of a U.S.-backed armed group that around March 20, Nusra officials began a round of meetings with non-jihadist opposition groups from Hama, Latakia and southern Aleppo — including those supported by the United States — to persuade them to participate in a major offensive against the Assad regime, rather than in a ceasefire and political negotiations.
News media did not ignore the offensive launched on April 3 by Nusra Front and its “moderate” allies. The Los Angeles Times (4/4/16) described a “punishing attack” by Nusra and several “so-called moderate rebel factions” on the town of Al Eis, southwest of Aleppo, “overlooking the M5 highway, a vital artery connecting the Syrian capital, Damascus, in the southwest of the country, with the government-held city of Homs, in west-central Syria, and Aleppo in the north.”
Associated Press(4/3/16) reported that Nusra Front’s closest ally, Ahrar al Sham, together with U.S.-supported factions had simultaneously “seized government positions in heavy fighting in northwestern Latakia province.” The story quoted Zakariya Qaytaz of the U.S.-supported Division 13 brigade as telling the agency through Twitter: “The truce is considered over. This battle is a notice to the regime.”
The Nusra-led offensive was a decisive violation of the ceasefire, which effectively frustrated the intention of isolating the jihadists. It led to continued high levels of fighting in the three areas where it had taken place, and Russian planes returned to Nusra Front-controlled territory for the first time in nearly six weeks. Yet after the first reports on the offensive, its very existence vanished from media coverage of Syria.
Disappearing Key Facts
No U.S. newspaper followed up over the next two weeks to analyze its significance in terms of U.S. policy, especially in light of the role of “legitimate” armed opposition groups in trashing the ceasefire.
Wall Street Journal correspondent Sam Dagher (4/4/16) suggested in his initial report on the offensive that it was a response to a Syrian air force airstrike in an opposition-controlled suburb of Damascus two days earlier, which activists said killed 30 civilians. But the offensive was so complex and well-organized that it had obviously been prepared well in advance of that strike.
None of the other papers sought to portray the offensive as the result of a pattern of increasing military pressure on the Nusra Front or its allies. In fact, after the initial reports, all four major newspapers — the New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post — simply ignored the fact that the offensive had been carried out.
On April 19, three separate articles presented three variants of what became the broad media approach to explaining the fate of the ceasefire agreement. The Journal’s Nour Malas and Sam Dagher wrote: “A limited truce in Syria, brokered by the US and Russia in late February, has unraveled in recent weeks, with government forces escalating attacks on several fronts and rebels relaunching operations around the northern city of Aleppo.”
That formulation clearly suggested that either the regime had moved first, or that government and rebels had somehow both taken the offensive at the same moment; the former interpretation was encouraged by the headline, “Syrian Government Steps Up Airstrikes.”
On the same day, New York Times Beirut correspondent Anne Barnard wrote a piece focused mainly on regime airstrikes in two Idlib towns, Maarat al Numan and Kafr Nable, that had killed many as 40 civilians.
Barnard’s piece was headlined, “Ceasefire Crumbles as Bombings Kill Dozens” — suggesting that the airstrikes had somehow led to the “crumbling.” Barnard did refer to an otherwise unidentified “insurgent offensive” that preceded the strikes, but did not draw any causal relationship between it and the bombing.
The article cited the opposition claim that the government had repeatedly violated the partial ceasefire, but didn’t cite a single concrete instance of such a violation. And it appears to contradict that argument by observing that the Idlib airstrikes had ended “the relative respite from airstrikes that had lasted nearly two months” – i.e., from the time the ceasefire had gone into effect.
Yet a third article to appear that day, published by Reuters, explicitly asserted that the regime airstrike on a crowded market by Syrian planes to which Barnard referred was the cause of the failure of the partial ceasefire.
“Syrian peace talks appeared all but doomed on Tuesday,” it said, “after airstrikes killed about 40 people in a crowded vegetable market in rebel territory, with the opposition saying a truce was finished and it would keep out of negotiations indefinitely.”
Wrapping Up the Distortions
Finally, on April 27, Karen DeYoung, associate editor of the Washington Post, wrote a news analysis piece looking back on what happened to the ceasefire. The piece never mentioned the major Nusra Front offensive in which U.S.-supported armed groups had played a key role, passing on instead the distorted explanation of the fate of the ceasefire offered by national security bureaucrats.
“Some Defense Department and intelligence officials,” she wrote, “think Russia and its Syrian government client are clearly violating the ceasefire and provoking the opposition into doing the same.”
Like the three April 19 articles, DeYoung focused entirely on military moves taken by the regime more than two weeks after the joint Nusra/opposition April offensive. She cited the Syrian government bombing of Kafr Nabl and Maarat al Numan the previous week, asserting that the towns were “heavily bombed by Assad after rebel forces threw out Nusra occupiers and civilians took to the streets in anti-Assad demonstrations.”
But that characterization of the situation in the two towns, clearly aimed to support the notion that they were free of Nusra control, was false. In fact, Kafr Nabl had formerly been the home of the U.S.-backed Division 13, but far from having been thrown out, Nusra Front had reasserted its direct control over the towns in mid-March, kicking Division 13 out of its base and seizing its U.S.-supplied weapons after a fight over the larger town Maarat al Numan.
DeYoung went so far as to embrace the CIA/Pentagon bureaucrats’ argument that the United States should not have agreed to allow any attacks on Nusra Front in the ceasefire agreement.
“The Nusra ceasefire exception had already left a hole big enough for the Syrian government and Russia to barrel through,” she wrote, “and they have not hesitated to do so in pursuit of regaining the initiative on the ground for Assad.”
The implication of the argument is that the United States should do nothing to interfere with Nusra’s capacity to strike at the Assad regime. Thus DeYoung quoted an analyst for the Institute for the Study of War, which favors a more belligerent U.S. policy in Syria, dismissing the military collaboration by U.S.-supported groups with Nusra Front as not really significant, because it is only “tactical,” and that Nusra merely offers to help those allies “retaliate” against regime attacks, rather than seeking a military solution to the conflict.
Such arguments are merely shallow rationalizations, however, for the preference of hardliners in Washington for pitting Al Qaeda’s military power against Russia and its Syrian client, enhancing the power position of the U.S. national security state in Syria.
A Simplistic Summary
As more time passes, the media version of why the partial ceasefire failed has become even more simplistic and distorted. On July 12, DeYoung revisited the issue in the context of the Obama administration’s negotiations with Russia on military cooperation against Nusra Front. This time she portrayed the ceasefire quite starkly as the victim of Syrian and Russian bombing:
“Despite a ceasefire ostensibly in effect since February, Syrian planes have kept up a steady bombardment of both civilian and opposition sites — where they have argued that Al Nusra forces, exempt from the truce, are mixed with rebel groups covered by the accord. After observing the early weeks of the ceasefire, Russian planes joined the Syrian forces, including in an offensive last weekend that took over the only remaining supply route for both rebels and civilians hunkered down in the northern city of Aleppo.”
Playing the role of ultimate media arbiter of how the attentive public is to understand the pivotal issue of why the ceasefire failed, DeYoung has deleted from memory the essential facts. In her narrative, there was no Nusra Front plan to destroy the ceasefire, and no April Nusra offensive to seize strategic territory south of Aleppo with the full participation of U.S.-supported opposition groups.
The lesson of the Syrian ceasefire episode is clear: The most influential news media have virtually complete freedom to shape the narrative surrounding a given issue simply by erasing inconvenient facts from the story line. They can do that even when the events or facts have been reported by one or more of those very news media.
In the world of personal access and power inhabited by those who determine what will be published and what won’t, even the most obviously central facts are disposable in the service of a narrative that maintains necessary relationships.
US officials are considering new economic sanctions against Russia over the DNC email leak released by WikiLeaks, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing sources familiar with the situation.
Officials have not so far, however, reached common ground on how exactly to impose sanctions, the WSJreports.
Adopting more anti-Russian economic sanctions would mean delivering public accusations against Moscow or exposing links of the alleged hackers to Russia.
The White House has so far not commented, although the FBI and intelligence agencies investigating the cyberattack have “signaled” that the attack was “almost certainly” carried out by “Russian-affiliated hackers,” according to the WSJ.
The breach of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, already compared to the Watergate scandal, is far from reaching its peak, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has dropped a broad hint he has much more material to potentially publish.
Speaking in Washington DC on Thursday, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said she does not know exactly how the notorious DNC leak was possible, but that there could be no mistake about its initiator.
“I know for sure it is the Russians,” Pelosi told reporters, adding “we are assessing the damage.”
“This is an electronic Watergate… The Russians broke in. Who did they give the information to? I don’t know. Who dumped it? I don’t know,” she said, as quoted by the WSJ.
The Democrats are now urging the Obama administration to take decisive action.
“When the administration believes it has sufficient evidence of attribution, it will make that attribution public as well as consider any other steps necessary,” said Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
During President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, relations between Moscow and Washington have dropped to lows similar to those seen in the years of the Cold War.
Washington has already imposed a wide range of sanctions against Russian politicians and state companies following the reunification of Crimea with Russia, and accuses Moscow of being involved in the civil war in Ukraine.
Moscow has consistently denied allegations about its possible role in the hacking of US Democratic Party emails published by WikiLeaks.
“We are again seeing these maniacal attempts to exploit the Russian theme in the US election campaign,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Last year, President Obama signed an executive order that facilitates imposing sanctions against any country endangering US national security through cyberattacks.
“Our tools now include an executive order authorizing sanctions against those that engage in significant malicious cyber activities, such as harming our nation’s critical infrastructure – our transportation systems or power grid,” White House counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco said last month.
“Nations like Russia and China are growing more assertive and sophisticated in their cyber operations,” the US counterterrorism adviser claimed, before mentioning cyber threats from “non-state actors,” including Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).
There is the view in the US that the DNC breach is a tit-for-tat payback operation.
“They believe we are trying to influence political developments in Russia, trying to effect change, and so their natural response is to retaliate and do unto us as they think we’ve done unto them,” the director of US national intelligence, James Clapper, said last month, without making specific statements about the alleged Russian role in the DNC breach.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton seems to have no doubts whatsoever about the Russian involvement in the leaks.
“Russian intelligence services, which are part of the Russian government, which is under the firm control of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released…,” Clinton told Fox News earlier this week.
What if the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services were to report that $6.5 billion in spending by that federal agency was unaccounted for and untraceable? You can imagine the headlines, right? What if it was $65 billion? The headlines would be as big as for the first moon landing or for troops landing on Omaha Beach in World War II.
But how about a report by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General saying that the US Army had $6.5 trillion in unaccountable expenditures for which there is simply no paper trail? That is 6,500 billion dollars! Have you heard about that? Probably not. That damning report was issued back on July 26 — two whole weeks ago — but as of today it has not even been reported anywhere in the corporate media.
The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management & Comptroller) (OASA[FM&C]) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend JV adjustments made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation.2 The unsupported JV adjustments occurred because OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis did not prioritize correcting the system deficiencies that caused errors resulting in JV adjustments, and did not provide sufficient guidance for supporting system‑generated adjustments.
In addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System‑Budgetary (DDRS-B), a budgetary reporting system, removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY 2015. This occurred because DFAS Indianapolis did not have detailed documentation describing the DDRS-B import process or have accurate or complete system reports.
As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.
This dense bureaucrateze doesn’t mean that $6.5 trillion has been stolen, or that this is money in addition to the $600 billion that the Pentagon spent in fiscal 2015. It means that for years — and $6.5 trillion represents at about 15 years’ worth of US military spending — the Department of Defense (sic) has not been tracking or recording or auditing all of the taxpayer money allocated by Congress — what it was spent on, how well it was spent, or where the money actually ended up. There are enough opportunities here for corruption, bribery, secret funding of “black ops” and illegal activities, and of course for simple waste to march a very large army, navy and air force through. And by the way, things aren’t any better at the Navy, Air Force and Marines.
Incredibly, no mainstream reporter or editor in the US has seen this as a story worth reporting to the American public.
Just to give a sense of the scale of this outrage, consider that total federal discretionary spending in FY 2015 was just over $1.1 trillion. That includes everything from education ($70 billion), housing and community development ($63 billion), Medicare and health ($66 billion), veterans’ benefits ($65 billion), energy ($39 billion), transportation ($26 billion) and international affairs ($41 billion), and of course that $600 billion for the military.
All the other agencies that are responsible for those other outlays, like the Dept. of Education, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, etc., have been required by Congress since 1996 to file reports on annual audits of their budgets. The Pentagon was subject to that same act of Congress too, but for 20 years and running it has failed to do so. It has simply stonewalled, and so far has gotten away with it.
Nobody in Congress seems to care about this contempt of Congress. Neither of the two mainstream political candidates for president, Republican Donald Trump nor Democrat Hillary Clinton, seems to care either. Neither one has mentioned this epic scandal.
According to the OIG’s report, this problem actually goes back a generation, to 1991, five years before Congress even passed the law requiring all federal agencies to operate using federal accounting standards and to conduct annual audits, when the Government Accountability Office found “unsupported adjustments” were being made to the military’s financial statements during an audit of FY 1991 Army financial statements. Fully 17 years later, the Army, in its FY 2008 statement of Assurance on Internal Controls, said that the “weakness” found in 1991 “would be corrected by the end of FY 2011,” an outrageous decade later. But the OIG report goes on to say:
However, the FY 2015 Statement of Assurance on Internal Controls indicated this material weakness remained uncorrected and may not be corrected until third quarter 2017.
Such a lackadaisical attitude on the part of the Pentagon, Congress and the media towards such a massive accounting failure involving trillions of dollars is simply mind-boggling, and yet there is nobody in Congress jumping up and down in the well of the House or or at Armed Services Committee hearings demanding answers and heads. No president or presidential candidate is denouncing this atrocity.
Aside from the political question of how much the US should actually be spending on the military — and clearly, spending almost as much as the rest of the world combined on war and war preparedness is not justifiable — how can anyone, of any political persuasion, accept the idea of spending such staggering sums of money without insisting on any accountability?
Consider that politicians of both major political parties are demanding accountability for every penny spent on welfare, including demanding that recipients of welfare prove that they are trying to find work. Ditto for people receiving unemployment compensation. Consider the amount of money and time spent on testing students in public schools in a vain effort to make teachers accountable for student “performance.” And yet the military doesn’t have to account for any of its trillions of dollars of spending on manpower and weapons — even though Congress fully a generation ago passed a law requiring such accountability.
Phone and email requests to the DOD press office for the Office of Inspector General asking for comment went unanswered.
Mandy Smithberger, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), says, “Accounting at the Department of Defense is a disaster, but nobody is screaming about it because you have a lot of people in Congress who believe in more military spending, so they don’t really challenge military spending.” She adds, “You won’t see anything change unless Congress cuts the Pentagon budget in order to get results, and they’re not going to do that.”
She might have added that the reporters and editors and publishers of the corporate media also support military spending, so the media are not reporting on this scandal either, meaning that the public remains in the dark and unconcerned about it. Sure, the media will report on a $600 air force toilet seat and the public will be appropriately outraged, but there is no word about an untraceable $6.5 trillion in Army spending and no public outrage… except perhaps among those who read alternative publications like this one.
Enough! I don’t want to hear another complaint about government spending on welfare, education, environment, health care subsidies, immigrant benefits or whatever, until the Pentagon has to report on, account for and audit every dollar that it is spending on war.
Modern mass-media is replete with instances of cognitive dissonance. However none can so perfectly encapsulate the madness of the pretend world so many “journalists” now live in better, than these two offerings from the always entertaining Luke Harding.
It has been reported that Russia has beefed up security on the Ukraine-Crimea border, in response to an apparent attack by SBU agents that resulted in the deaths of 2 Russian servicemen, there are also fears Kiev may try to disrupt the September 18th parliamentary elections.
Luke’s reaction to this, on twitter, was as balanced and reasonable as anybody who reads his articles would expect (at least, the ones he hasn’t stolen from other people):
Yes, he declares the Ukrainian attacks are “classic fakery”, when asked he would not provide evidence for this assertion. But then evidence isn’t really Luke’s thing.
The strange thing is that, in his other writings, such as this column for the Guardian, he writes:
Last November Ukrainian activists blew up energy pipelines to Crimea, plunging homes into darkness. People ate dinner by candlelight, factories shut down and for the first few days even traffic lights stopped working. The peninsula’s water supply is also vulnerable.
So which is it Luke? Do Ukrainians target Crimea or not? How can you state that the most recent Ukrainian attacks on Crimea are “classic fakery”, whilst at the same time volunteering that Ukraine has been actively trying to terrorise the population of the peninsula for over two years?
How can you confidently speculate about “another invasion” of Ukraine by the Russian army:
At this point there seem to be three possible scenarios. One is that Putin will try to leverage this latest crisis to persuade EU countries to drop the sanctions imposed over the Ukraine conflict. Another is that he is preparing a limited military incursion, possibly to set up a security corridor, which doubtless would include the electricity station in the nearby Ukrainian city of Kherson. A third is that he is planning something bigger.
…whilst simultaneously admitting that every single one of your previous speculations as to Russia’s plans in Ukraine had been totally wrong?
In spring 2014 there was speculation that he would seek to carve out a land corridor connecting separatist Donetsk and Luhansk with Crimea. That would involve over-running Ukrainian forces in the port city of Mariupol and advancing along the coast. The Kremlin also floated the idea of Novorossiya, a historical pseudo-entity encompassing Ukraine’s southern and south-eastern Russian-speaking regions…None of this happened
Not for a moment does the author’s fevered brain consider that, given every single one of his previous speculations “never happened”, maybe he should lay off the speculating this time. Not once do his previous humiliations cause him to adjust his world view. It is, to put it bluntly, insane.
It is staggering that, no matter the utter and complete failures of logic, no matter the number of totally incorrect rampant speculations they publish, the MSM will simply continue to push insane narratives about Russia, written by a man with only the flimsiest grasp on reality.
Oh well, that’s The Guardian for you. And especially Luke Harding, it’s why he’s our favourite
Iran has rejected as “ludicrous and baseless” recent reports by Israeli media that Iranian weapons have ended up in the hands of Takfiri Daesh terrorists operating in Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula.
An informed source in the Iranian Foreign Ministry dismissed the claims as “insignificant” on Wednesday, saying “such awkward and unfounded news fabrication will never change the realities.”
“Iran’s unchanging and permanent policy on terrorist-Zionist groups like Daesh is quite evident,” said the official.
The source went on to say that the Islamic Republic will “spare no effort” in fighting terrorist groups such as Daesh and will continue encouraging the world to counter their “inhumane activities.”
The entire world has come to realize the link between “the evil triangle of the Zionist regime, Saudi Arabia and Takfiri terrorists who are hell-bent on creating and perpetuating chaos and insecurity in the region and the world,” the official added.
The Sinai Peninsula has been under a state of emergency since October 2014, following a deadly terrorist attack that claimed the lives of 33 soldiers.
In recent years, militants have been carrying out anti-government activities and deadly attacks in the region, taking advantage of the turmoil caused after democratically-elected President Mohamed Morsi was ousted by the military in July 2013.
Militants from the Takfiri Velayat Sinai group, Daesh’s offshoot in northeastern Egypt, have claimed responsibility for most of the attacks, mainly targeting the army and police.
Previously known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, the terrorist outfit has pledged allegiance to Daesh in Iraq and Syria.
Takfiri groups, such as Daesh, are a sworn enemy of Iran and regard Iranians a regular target of their terrorist attacks.
There is a story about ISIS using some special metal instrument to clip or bite women’s breasts. In some version of the story, the women were breastfeeding in public. In other versions, it’s because of a failure to completely cover the body, I think one version is that the woman was not wearing gloves (!)
As you know, I’ve made it something of a life project to develop higher Bullshit Detection Quotient, and I immediately suspected, even assumed that the story was bullshit. In fact, I wrote a sarcastic comment (#8) after the story.
In that comment, I wondered whether anybody had a picture or drawing of this object called “the biter”, used to slice women’s tits. I forget when exactly, at most a month ago, I came across an article in the Daily Mail detailing the same story.
But this article actually contains a picture of the horrid instrument in question, the “biter”! It’s the second image on the page. Actually, let me embed it right here:
Now, in Google Chrome, you can right-click on an image and just do a google image search. Just right-click the above image and choose “Search google for image”. The top two results containing this photo are the wikipedia page for the “breast ripper”
and the next one is some page devoted to the most gruesome medieval torture instruments,
The “Breast Ripper” is number 2 actually, one above the rack!
So, this is the instrument used (currently!) by ISIS to cut up women’s titties in Mosul, Iraq, a museum piece of some instrument in Europe back in the time of the inquisition or something. Did they go off and break into some medieval torture museum in Germany to get their hands on one of these tit-slicing devices?
Even before finding this image and seeing what it was from the Google image search, I had very great doubts about the story. You see, I look at it this way. If they said that ISIS entered some town and raped every woman they came across, I could believe that pretty easily. Even then, it might not be true, but I am a man and can relate to it. A mass rape story, I don’t condone it or anything, but I understand it. This story of gouging women’s tits, just like the bayoneting Belgian babies story, has a strong feel of war propaganda about it. Like, if you think about it a bit, why would they do that? Obviously, any woman you do that to, that’s somebody’s sister or somebody’s mother, a childhood friend… any occupying army that did this would automatically be making enemies of so many people utterly gratuitously, no?
In any case, the story is obviously designed to rile people up. Like the bayoneting babies or whatever. Males are programmed to be protective of females and such a story is, of course, meant, quite crudely, to push our buttons, no?
I believe pretty strongly, at maybe the 98% level or so that you could go to Mosul, Iraq and ask as many people as you want about this “Breast Ripper” instrument and ISIS using it to tear up women’s tits, and nobody would know WTF you are talking about. This is a narrative constructed for a Western audience.
The “Breast Ripper” story is just part of a general narrative that exists to vilify Arabs and Muslims generally. What is striking about it is that, at least from the Daily Mail article, where they provide this photo, anybody can just right-click on the photo and do the Google image search and see that this is a medieval torture instrument. The people behind this wanted to include a picture, but of course there is none, because nobody is slicing women’s tits in Mosul, Iraq (almost certainly not…) and so they fished up the image of a medieval instrument that corresponds to that description, and then they say: “here’s your breast ripper device that ISIS is using…” Now, you might be inclined to think that they would never be so sloppy as to do something that is so easily exposed, but… they are!
It’s very problematic to be mirroring this kind of vile garbage. This is evil warmongering propaganda and spreading it would make one complicit morally.
Unsuspecting citizens are paying for a nexus of interlocking agencies that conspire to create terror, war, and police-state legislation in a War of Deception that serves to devastate humanity.
Without its arsenal of fabricated war pretexts, and its fabricated fear apparatus, the warmongering oligarchy would be denuded and reveal itself as the mass-murdering terrorist entity that it is.
Most recently, in Canada, Justice Catherine Bruce disclosed the true nature of an RCMP terror plot when she overturned terror convictions against two patsies – John Nuttal and Amanda Korody – who were set up by police operatives to commit a terrorist act for which they would otherwise be totally incapable of performing.
Bruce stated the obvious when she observed that,
“Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor sufficient motivation to do it themselves.”
The “forbidden truth” is that agencies of Canada’s federal government created a false flag terror event with a view to:
create an atmosphere of fear (aimed at the general public as well as politicians),
create Islamophobia
create a false pretext for a War on Terror (translated: illegal imperial invasions using un-Islamic terrorists as proxy armies)
create a pretext for unconstitutional, fascist, police state legislation (C-51 legislation)
Unsuspecting, otherwise peace-loving citizens, are also being duped into paying for Private Intelligence Contractors (PICS) who receive lucrative government contracts to engage in a full spectrum of activities designed to create and sustain war crimes.
Science Application International Corporation (SAIC) is likely the largest (and least known) PIC, with a huge staff (about 40,000 in 2007, likely more now), and it is fully integrated into the War Machine.
Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele report in “Washington’s $ Billion Shadow”, that
‘SAIC’s friends in Washington are everywhere, and play on all sides; the connections are tightly interlocked. To cite just one example: Robert M. Gates, the new secretary of defense, whose confirmation hearings lasted all of a day, is a former member of SAIC’s board of directors …’
The U.S. government, through its incestuous relationship with SAIC, effectively created false intelligence – with impunity —as a fabricated pretext to wage the illegal war of aggression against Iraq.
Fake intelligence reports were also used to pin the East Ghouta (false flag) terror event on the Assad government, and to provoke a direct U.S/Coalition military invasion to depose Syria’s democratically-elected President.
some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as ‘plausible denial.’
The CIA specializes in the commission of crimes beneath which the protective shield of “plausible deniability” can be invoked should suspicions of CIA complicity be aroused.
Professor Tim Anderson and others also demonstrate, with sustainable evidence, that the East Ghouta gas attack was false flag terrorism.
The Pentagon’s use of PICS to perpetrate war crimes is now becoming normalized. According to Kate Brannen in “Spies-for-Hire Now at War in Syria”, the Pentagon publicly disclosed the terms of a contract with a PIC called Six3 Intelligence Solutions to provide “intelligence analysis services” in a number of countries, but most notably, Syria. The public may not be aware that such an intervention in Syria is illegal, or that Six3 Intelligence Solutions has a proven track record as interrogators at the Abu Ghraib torture chambers, or that it will no doubt offer the CIA plenty of “plausible deniability” to perpetrate crimes with impunity.
Whereas the government and its agencies should be using our tax dollars to “create no harm”, and to further the cause of peace and prosperity, it is clear beyond any reasonable doubt that governing agencies are creating much harm, through stealth and deception, thanks to the steady flow of tax dollars streaming into their coffers.
The Israeli Political Spectrum From The “Liberal Left” To The Far Right, Is United In Genocide
The Dissident | May 5, 2026
… The fundamental issue of Israel is not Benjamin Netanyahu, but the fact that Israel is overwhelmingly a bloodthirsty, war-ready, genocidal society.
Historian Zachary Foster has documented that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis have supported every Israeli war since the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, writing:
2006
86% of the Israeli adult population justified “the IDF operation in Lebanon against Hizbollah,” or 2006 Lebanon War, in which Israel killed 1,191 people, the vast majority civilians according to HRW (Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher)
2008-2009
82% of the Israeli public thought that the 2008-9 war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 1,417 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians.) Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher
2012
90% of Israeli Jews supported war on Gaza ( in which Israel killed 160 Palestinians, 66% civilians)
2014
95% of Jewish Israelis believed the war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 2,310 Palestinians, 70% civilians)
2021
72% of Israelis believed the war on Gaza should continue (as of May 21) after Israel had already killed 250 Palestinians in Gaza, vast majority civilians. The % of Jewish Israelis who supported killing more Palestinians was much higher.
2024
A January poll found 95% of Jewish Israelis thought the Israeli military was using either the “appropriate” amount of force or “too little” force in Gaza at a time when Israel had already killed >25,700 Palestinians in Gaza.
2024
In September, 90% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Lebanon (in which Israel killed 800+, including hundreds of civilians)
2025
In March, 82% of Israeli Jews supported the forced expulsion of residents of Gaza, Israel’s main goal in it’s genocide & war on Gaza.
2025
In June, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Iran known as the “twelve day war”
2026
On March 4, 93% of Israeli Jews expressed support for the war on Iran. 97% of “right-wing” Jewish Israelis support it, compared with 93% in the center and 76% on the left.
The overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis also have openly genocidal views towards Palestinians.
Polls in Israel have shown that:
84% of the (Israeli )public gives the IDF an excellent or very good grade regarding the moral conduct of the army
75% of Jewish Israelis agree with the idea that ‘there are no innocents in Gaza.’
A vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are ‘not so troubled’ or ‘not troubled at all’ by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
The fundamental problem in Israel is Zionism, not Benjamin Netanyahu. – Full article
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News 